Dark of the Moon (22 page)

“Oh…” Stryker held his hands up in the air,
what next?
“Jeez.”

“Something else occurred to me. He’s the dog that didn’t bark,” Virgil said.

“What?”

“He’s at every crime scene—he knows everything. But I didn’t see him at the Judd fire. Where the hell was he? The fire trucks went out there with their sirens screaming, where was Williamson?”

Stryker said, “I don’t know. Maybe…running away from it?”

Virgil nodded: “He’s the guy. Bet you a dollar.”

T
HEY WERE TALKING
to the judge about a search warrant when Sandy called again: “Lucas screamed at a man at CPS and they won’t cough the file without a court order, but the guy confirmed off the record that the kid was Baby Boy Lane.”

“I will kiss you on the lips next time I’m up there,” Virgil said.

“I’ll look forward to it,” she said, primly.

T
HE JUDGE SUGGESTED
that there was little evidence to support a search warrant.

Stryker said, “Randy, goddamnit, don’t dog us around with some pissant evidence bullshit. It’s about fifty percent that Todd is the killer and he’s gonna do it again. I want to get all over him before he has a chance.”

“What if you don’t find anything? He’s gonna sue your pants off,” the judge said.

“Not my pants, the county’s pants,” Stryker said. “If I don’t solve this case pretty damn quick, I’m gonna lose my job anyway, so why should I care? Sign the warrant.”

“Okay, okay, keep your shirt on.”

Outside the judge’s office, warrant in hand, Virgil said, “Your judicial efficiency is a marvel.”

“Out here, you take care of yourself,” Stryker said.

They brought in Larry Jensen, the investigator, and four other deputies. Stryker and two of the deputies took the newspaper office. Virgil, Jensen, and two more deputies headed for Williamson’s home. “Call me every five minutes, tell me what you got,” Stryker said. “Find a .357.”

“Find a typewriter,” Virgil said.

W
ILLIAMSON LIVED
in a square, flat, single-story white house with a flat-roofed garage set farther back, and a long screen porch on the front, in an old neighborhood on the east side of town. From Williamson’s house, Virgil thought, getting to the Gleasons’ would have been a snap: Williamson was two blocks from the riverbank.

In the heavy rain the night of the murders, he could have walked over to the bridge across the river, off the far end of the bridge, along the riverbank, and up the slope to Gleason’s. After the killings, he could be back home in fifteen minutes. No muss, no fuss, no cars in the night. And that, he thought, was why the killings may have taken place during a thunderstorm. The neighbors wouldn’t be out, everybody would have been snuggled up in front of the TV.

Virgil drove over, alone in his truck, because he’d learned that if he went to a crime scene in somebody else’s vehicle, he’d need to leave before they did, or after they did. Jensen and the other two cops followed in two sheriff’s patrol cars. Virgil stopped in front of the house, and the deputies pulled into the driveway, one car going all the way to the garage, to cover the back door.

They got out, watching the doors, Virgil with a hand on his weapon, Jensen with a hand on his own. The screen door was open and he and Jensen went through, hammered on the front door. No answer. Tried the door: locked.

Jensen said, “Wait one.” He went out to his car, brought back a long-shaft Maglite, and used the butt end to knock out a pane of glass in the door. Reaching through, he flipped the lock. “We’re in.”

T
HEY CLEARED
the place, making sure that Williamson wasn’t inside, then started pulling it apart. The furniture was comfortable, but old, as if it had come from a high-end used-furniture place. There were six rooms, all on the first floor: kitchen, small dining room, living room, good-sized bath, a bedroom used as a home office, and the actual bedroom. Exterior doors leading out through the kitchen to the garage; and out the front.

Virgil took the bedroom, Jensen took the office, one of the other deputies did the kitchen. Virgil opened and emptied all the drawers, worked through the closet, checking all the pockets in all the clothes, checked the walls and baseboards for hidey-holes, plugged a lamp into the outlets to make sure they were real, turned and patted the mattress, lifted and turned the box springs, lifted the braided rug.

The only thing he found of even the remotest interest was a half-dozen vintage
Penthouse
magazines, featuring well-thumbed hard-core porn, stashed under the corner of the bed, within easy reach.

Jensen was hung up in the office. “Lot of paper,” he said, looking up from the office chair, his lap full of files. “So far, nothing about being adopted. Got job stuff; he was in the Army in Iraq in ninety, in supply…No guns at all.”

The cop in the kitchen had come up empty, and had then gone out to the garage, gotten a stepladder, and now had his head poked through a hatch that led into a space under the roof. “Lots of insulation,” he said. “Lots of dust. Doesn’t look like it’s been opened in years…”

Virgil was working through the living room—found another stash of porn, this on video, behind the DVD player—when he heard the deputy outside calling, “Hey, hey, Todd. Hold it, Todd.”

Virgil drew his pistol, felt Jensen moving in the office, and then Williamson came through the screen door and the front door on the run. Virgil, from the corner of his eye, could see through the porch screen that Williamson’s car had been dumped in the street, the door still open.

Williamson’s hands were empty but he was screaming and came straight at Virgil, and Virgil pushed the weapon back into the holster and when Williamson kept coming, hands up, he took one wrist and turned him, pushed him, and Jensen was there to push him again, and the other cop came in from the kitchen, and the outside deputy ran in the front door, his pistol drawn, and Virgil turned to Williamson and Virgil was shouting, “Hands over head, hands on the wall, on the wall.”

Williamson shouted, “What the fuck are you doing, what the fuck is going on…” but he put his hands on the wall, and Virgil patted him down.

“What the fuck…”

Virgil said, “You can slow down, or we’ll have to put some handcuffs on you. Calm down; you can step away from the wall.”

Williamson’s face was dead red, and he was breathing like a man having a heart attack. “What the hell is going on?”

“We’re searching your house. We have a warrant.”

Williamson’s mouth worked, but nothing came out for a minute, and then Virgil saw him relax, make the small move that meant that he’d gotten it together. Virgil stepped back. “You okay?”

Williamson, still angry, but not uncontrolled: “What…are…you doing?”

“We’re looking for anything that might tie you to the murders of the Gleasons, the Schmidts, and Bill Judd.”

“What…what?”

“We know about your adoption,” Virgil said.

“My adoption? My adoption?” His mouth hung open for a moment, then, “What about my adoption?”

“You were born here in Bluestem when your mother was killed in an automobile accident after a party at Bill Judd’s. You’re Bill Judd’s son.”

Williamson actually staggered back away from Virgil. “That’s not possible. How is that possible? That’s horseshit.”

“You didn’t know?” Virgil was skeptical.

“No!” Williamson shouted. “I didn’t. I don’t believe it. My mother…” He reeled away. “My mother got pregnant and gave me up for adoption. Didn’t want me. That’s what my mom told me. My real mom.”

“Your real mom…?”

“My real parents…” Williamson’s face had gone from red to white, and now was going red again. “David and Louise Williamson. Where did you get this bullshit?” He looked around. “What have you done to my house? What have you done? You motherfuckers are gonna pay for this…”

T
HEY COOLED HIM OFF
and Virgil told him, bluntly: “We’re going through here inch by inch. Frankly, it’s not possible that you wound up here by accident.”

“Not by accident. Not by accident,” Williamson said. “I was working up in Edina, at the suburban papers, and Bill—it was Bill, not me. My editor met Bill at an editor-and-publisher meeting. My guy came back and said Judd had seen some of my stuff, and wondered if I’d be open to working in a small town.”

“So you left Edina and moved to Bluestem?” Virgil’s eyebrow went up. “Not a common thing to do.”

Williamson looked around and said, “Okay if I sit down?” Virgil nodded, and he dropped onto a couch, and wiped his sweaty forehead on the sleeve of his shirt. “Look. I was working in the Cities, I was making thirty-eight thousand a year, and it wasn’t going to get any better. I learned journalism in the Army; I don’t have a college degree. The big papers were losing staff, everything was going in the toilet. So Judd says, come on down to Bluestem, I’ll pay you forty thousand a year and vouch for you, so you can get a mortgage.”

Williamson looked around the house. “You know how much this place cost?”

Virgil shook his head, but Jensen said, “I think it was up for forty-five thousand?”

“They took forty. I’m paying two hundred a month for a pretty decent house. In the Cities, I lived in a slum apartment that cost me eight hundred a month. The job wasn’t going to get any better, either, even if the papers survived. Out here…” He shrugged. “I’ve got my own house, I’m sort of a big shot…I like the work.”

The anger flooded back: “So go ahead and search, you fuckers. There’s nothing here because I had nothing to do with any murders.” To Jensen: “You know where I was when the Gleasons were killed? I was at the Firehouse Funder, down at Mitchell’s. There were three hundred people there, and I was reporting it, and I gave a talk.” He started shouting again. “You think about asking me for an alibi?”

“Take it easy…”

Still shouting: “And that stuff about Bill being my father…I want to see some proof. I want to see some DNA. Hey: you got a warrant? Are you searching the office…”

W
ILLIAMSON WAS
out in the kitchen, getting a cup of coffee, watched by a deputy, when Jensen said to Virgil, “If that was an act, it was a pretty good act.”

“If he did the murders, he’s a psycho,” Virgil said. “Psychos spend their lives fooling people…You want the dining room? I’ll take the garage.”

Monday Afternoon

C
UMULUS CLOUDS WERE
thick as cotton balls in a hospital room, some of the bottoms turning blue: more thunderstorms coming in. Stryker was sitting at his desk, fingers knitted behind his ear, heels on the corner of his desk, staring out the window across the parking lot. Virgil sat across from him, saying not much.

Finally Stryker yawned, stretched, dropped his feet to the floor, and said, “Well, that was your basic cluster-fuck.”

“There’s a connection in there. Gotta be,” Virgil said. “I will bet you one hundred American dollars that he’s the guy.”

“It was one dollar this morning.”

“One hundred dollars,” Virgil repeated.

“Straight up? A hundred dollars?”

Virgil thought about it for a moment, then said, “You’d have to give me two to one.”

Stryker tried to laugh, then shook his head, said, “Damnit, he’s gonna crucify us Thursday morning.”

“Then we need to give him a better story,” Virgil said. “I’m thinking about calling Pirelli. See what he has to say for himself.”

“You do that, “Stryker said, standing up. “I’ve got to run over to the jail. If I don’t see you later, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

V
IRGIL WANDERED OUT
of the office, stopped at the men’s room. The second-best place to think, after a shower, was a nice, quiet urinal.

Williamson claimed that Judd found
him
; that he hadn’t found Judd. That had a certain straightforward logic to it that appealed to Stryker. If Williamson was Judd’s kid, Judd would have known it. Was it possible that as he’d gotten old, and maybe started to think about what was coming, maybe started to read a little Revelation, that he’d softened up, and gathered his children around him? Was that why his will wasn’t in the safe-deposit box? Had he been thinking of changing it? Would that have given Junior reason to get rid of the old man?

On the other hand, Williamson’s alibi, that he’d been at the Firehouse Funder, was too convenient for Virgil’s taste. The fund-raiser had been held at Mitchell’s, the local sports bar. Mitchell’s back door emptied into an extra parking lot. From the parking lot to the Gleasons’ house was a five-minute jog along the railroad tracks, then across the bridge and up the hill. All suitably dark. And by ten o’clock, the eating had been over for two hours, and the drinking had gotten under way. Would anybody have noticed if Todd Williamson, so evident around the place all evening, had slipped away for twenty-five minutes? Had not gone to the john, but out the back door?

As far as Virgil was concerned, the alibi was far short of watertight.

Stryker disagreed.

Fuck him.

H
E WAS WASHING
his hands when a deputy stepped in, glanced at the two empty toilet booths, then said, “I need a word with you, but I don’t want it getting out that I talked to you.”

Virgil shrugged: “Sure, but…”

“But what?” The deputy’s name tag said “Merrill.” He was nervous and blunt. He wore gold-rimmed glasses and a brush mustache.

“But this is a murder case,” Virgil said. “If you’ve got something to say, you oughta say it. I can’t promise to hold it confidentially.”

Merrill rubbed his nose, looked at the door, and then said, “I saw you up to the fire at Judd’s.”

Virgil nodded: Let the guy talk.

“So…this is probably nothing, and that’s why I hate to say anything…but…”

“Say it; I ain’t gonna bite,” Virgil said.

“Jesse Laymon was there. Drinking beer, rubberneckin’.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, she’s seeing the sheriff, socially, everybody knows that. The thing is, I know her truck, and I didn’t see it come in, and I didn’t see it go. I never saw her ride off with any of the other people there. I know about everybody in the county, everybody who was up there, and I’ve been asking around…I can’t find anybody who took her, or who brought her in. It was raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock; seems odd to think that she walked in.”

“She had a can of beer in her hand when I saw her,” Virgil said.

“Yup,” Merrill said. “I assumed that she came up with the folks from the bar. But I can’t find anybody she rode with.”

“You sure you’d know her truck?”

“Man, Jesse is…one of the hottest chicks in the county. I know her truck. I wave at her every time I see her.”

Virgil looked at him for a minute, then said, “Keep your mouth shut on this.”

“You gonna do something about it?”

“I will.”

B
UFFALO
R
IDGE
was something like the hill at the Stryker farm, but twenty or fifty times as large, covered with knee-high bluestem grass, outcrops of the red rock, with a spring, a stream, and a lake on the north side, and Judd’s house and the Buffalo Jump bluff on the southeast. There were park roads both north and south; the south road came off a state highway and curled around the top of the mound; halfway to the top, Judd’s driveway broke off to the east to the homesite, now just a hole in the ground.

Virgil took the drive, parked next to the foundation hole. He got out and looked in. The ash had been worked over with rakes. Looking for a safe, Virgil thought; Junior hoping for a will.

Okay. If he were going to kill a man, and set fire to his house, how would he run? Wouldn’t run south, because you’d fall over the bluff and kill yourself. Wouldn’t go east, because there was nothing there but a lot of hillside, weeds, and rocks. You could break a leg in the dark.

You could run back down the drive, to the park road, then down the park road to the entrance. Would you get to the entrance before the fire department? Must be a mile or more, and the fire department had a couple of first responders on duty all the time. If you were in a car, or a truck, you could get down there in a minute, but running, even with a small flashlight, would take you eight minutes or so.

Or you could go north, climbing the hill, and then circling around. That would be more dangerous, again risking rocks and holes, but you could take it slow in the rain, and work up behind the rubberneckers…

He knew the road, so he walked the north route, across the hillside. Came over the top, saw the first of the buffalo. They were far enough away not to be a problem, but he kept an eye on them; and they kept an eye on him. The day was still warm, close to perfect, but the clouds were thickening up. He zigzagged looking for a trail, a break that somebody might have followed through the high grass, but saw nothing in particular.

And the going was rough. He tried walking with his eyes closed, and floundered around like a two-legged goat. Huh.

He looked back at the road. The road was it.

B
ACK IN
B
LUESTEM,
he walked down to Judd Jr.’s office. His secretary was standing in the door of the inner office, talking, and stopped when Virgil came in. She said, “Mr. Flowers is here.”

Judd stepped into Virgil’s line of view, cracked a smile: “You got old Todd hung from a light post yet?”

“Not yet,” Virgil said. “I need to talk to you for a minute.”

Judd pointed at a chair, and said to the secretary, “Run up to Rexall and get me a sleeve of popcorn.”

She wanted to stay and listen, but shook her head and shuffled off. Virgil waited until she was gone. Judd said, “I don’t need any more family members, Mr. Flowers. I already had one too many.”

“Yeah, well, I guess you should have talked to your father about that,” Virgil said. He asked, “Who cut your father’s lawn? Who cut that piece of short grass out between the house and the bluff? I didn’t see any lawn mowers on the garage pad.”

Judd was puzzled: “Well, he had all of his yard care done by Stark Gardens. They got a greenhouse and do lawn care and cleanup…Why?”

“Trying to nail a few things down—who might have been coming and going,” Virgil said. “The night of the fire, do you have any idea of how long it took the fire department to get up there?”

Judd shook his head—“You could ask them, but I imagine, let me see: Somebody had to call it in, then the guys had to get going…had to get through town…Doesn’t seem long, but I bet it was eight or ten minutes.”

“Okay.” Virgil stood up. “Thanks.”

Judd said, leaning back in his leather chair, “I’d like to know something. Just between you and me. Private.”

“Ask,” Virgil said.

“You gettin’ anywhere?”

Virgil said, “I think so. I feel like things are about to break.”

Judd said, “Jesus, I hope. I made some calls up to the Cities, to ask about you. Word was, you’re pretty good. I need to stop walking around feeling like there’s a crosshairs on my neck.”

Virgil thought about Pirelli and his DEA crew: “I can sympathize. You could be excused for feeling a little twitchy right now.”

A
T THE SHERIFF
’
S OFFICE,
he asked for Margo Carr, the crime-scene tech. She worked the north county as a full-time deputy when she wasn’t doing crime-scene work, he was told. He borrowed a radio and called her.

“You keep your crime-scene stuff in your truck?”

“I do,” she said.

“Meet me somewhere,” he said. “I need to borrow some spy equipment.”

There was a moment’s silence, then she said, with a smile lurking in her voice, “Mr. Flowers, Agent Flowers…”

Flowers said, “Just meet me.”

They hooked up five miles out of town. Carr was a redhead, chunky in all of her gear, and not that pretty, but she gave off a distinct vibe, and Virgil had the feeling that there’d never been a shortage of men coming around. He borrowed a metal-detecting wand from her. “When you said ‘spy equipment’…” she began.

“Between you and me, that was for other listeners,” Virgil said. “If other listeners ask me what I borrowed, don’t tell them.”

T
HE SUN WAS
a red ball, still two hand-widths above the horizon, thunderheads starting to pop up, when Virgil turned off the interstate and headed into Roche. The bad thing was, it was Monday evening, and most people didn’t go dancing on Mondays. The good thing was, Roche was tiny. He could park a half mile away, down the back road out of town, on the crest of a hill, and watch the Laymon house with his Zeiss binoculars.

That’s what he did. There was a Ford Taurus and a beat-up Ford F-150 parked in the side yard, one for each of the women, he thought. Jesse would be out, or going out. Stryker was all over her, and she did like to move around. Her mother was the question…

While he waited, he put through a call to Pirelli. Pirelli was working, he was told, and would probably call back in a minute or two, or maybe never.

Pirelli called back: “Things are moving. Be patient. I won’t talk to you about this on a cell phone, but we got to an inside guy, one of the local grain handlers. There’s a building out there that they call ‘the lab,’ and none of the locals are allowed in. We are ninety-nine percent, and after tonight…we should be better. So…”

“Stay in touch.”

S
TRYKER SHOWED AT
8:30
.

Jesse didn’t wait for him to come in. As soon as he pulled up, she came out, walked around the front of the truck, and climbed in. Stryker did a U-turn and headed out of town, toward the interstate. They were ten miles from anywhere, so it’d take them twenty minutes to get back, even if they had a fight and called the date off…

So there was the second car. Virgil watched for fifteen minutes, half an hour, hoping in the fading light that Margaret Laymon would go for a ride. A few minutes before nine o’clock, she came out to her car. He wasn’t precisely sure it was she, but whoever it was got in the Taurus, did a turn, and headed for the interstate.

Virgil started the truck, and rolled in behind her.

Watched her taillights disappear…

Was it possible, he wondered, that Jesse, having already learned from her mother that she was a Judd heir, had also learned there might yet be a third heir? And not knowing that the third heir was already in town, had gone about eliminating any leads to him? Or might there be a conspiracy to set Jesse up with an inheritance?

That, he thought, sounded like a TV show.

So why are you sitting in this truck, Virgil, with a butter knife in your hands, a butter knife that you stole, showing no conscience about it at all, from the poor folks at the Holiday Inn?

Because a butter knife was the perfect thing with which to slip the crappy lock on the Laymons’ front door.

H
E DIDN
’
T HIDE.
He made sure Margaret was well out of town, then turned back and parked in front of her house. Put the metal wand in a jacket pocket, held the butter knife partly up his coat sleeve, in his right hand. Pushed the doorbell, heard it ring. Pushed it and held it. Dropped the butter knife into his hand. Held the doorbell, looked back toward the interstate. No headlights.

Slipped the knife into the crack of the door, pushed, felt the lock slip, and pressed the door open with his toe. Stepped inside, into the light. Five minutes to go through the house. Checked a bedroom, found old photos, a made bed, and a framed Doors poster. Had to be Margaret’s.

Next bedroom: an iPod on the nightstand, the bed unmade. Jesse’s. Now where…?

Virgil looked around, turned on the wand, and began to hunt. He moved through the bedroom quickly, getting metallic pulses from almost everything. But nothing in a wrong spot…

And finally got a strong pulse from a pair of knee-high winter boots in the closet, which was the second place he’d looked, after the chest of drawers.

Turned the boot, and the revolver tumbled out into the lamplight.

He didn’t touch it immediately, but he smiled. Pretty good. He took a pencil from his pocket, moved the gun around. Smith & Wesson, .357 Magnum. He slipped the pencil down the muzzle, used it to lift the gun and drop it into a Ziploc bag. He put the bag in his pocket, then sat back on his heels, working it through.

After a minute, he moved back through the house, closed the door behind him, heard the lock latch. In the dark, he could see lightning both to the southeast and to the northwest, but could hear no thunder. Those storms would miss Bluestem. Overhead, a million stars twinkled down from the Milky Way.